Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  The customers—the passengers—were in their own saloon. Ken and Clarisse Mayhew I had already met, of course; the others, until now, had been no more than names on the passenger list. There was a Dr. Thorne—I never did get it straight what exactly he was a doctor of—and his wife.

  They were Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt in reverse, he a bearded, Falstaffian giant, she a gray, wispy sparrow. There were two, almost identical young men; mousey, studious, bespectacled. Their names were Paul Trentham and Bill Smith. The two young women could have been their sisters, but were not. One was Susan Howard, the other Mary Lestrange. They were friendly enough—not that they overdid it.

  Sara, ever efficient, had seen to it that the bar in the saloon was well-stocked. Thorne took over as barman; the drinks soon dispelled the initial stiffness of this first meeting. I rather took to the leader of the expedition and he to me. I felt that I would be able, without giving offense, to ask him a question that had been bothering me slightly.

  “Tell me, Doctor,” I put to him, “why don’t you have any mediums along? You have two psionicists, sure, but they are, essentially, communications specialists, and by communications I don’t mean communications with the dear departed.”

  He laughed, a little ruefully. “One thing that our researches have taught us is this. There are many, many phoney mediums. Even the genuine ones sometimes, although not always intentionally so.”

  “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “Look at it this way. A genuine medium is determined to deliver the goods. If the goods aren’t forthcoming, because conditions aren’t right, perhaps, then he or she would just hate to disappoint the customers. Quite possibly subconsciously—but now and again consciously—fake results are delivered. The main trouble, I suppose, is that the average medium doesn’t have it drummed into him, all through a long training, that high standards of professional ethics must be maintained. A graduate of the Rhine Institute, however—such as Ken Mayhew—is bound by the Institute’s code of ethics. He is therefore far more reliable than any medium.”

  “But you do believe in spiritualism, don’t you?”

  “I believe that there are hauntings. I believe that Kinsolving’s Planet is haunted. I—we—want to find out by whom. Or what.”

  “I seem to be spending my life finding out,” grumbled Grimes. “But every time I get a different answer.”

  “Perhaps you’re a catalyst, Commodore,” suggested Mrs. Thorne.

  “And perhaps Captain Rule is a dogalyst,” said Sonya.

  I tried to laugh along with the rest at the vile pun—jokes about the Dog Star Line are all right when we make them, but . . .

  The voyage was a relatively short one. It was like all other voyages, except that at the latter end of it we should not be landing at a proper spaceport with all the usual radio-navigational aids. There would be no bored voice coming from the NST speaker, talking us down. There would be no triangle of beacons to mark our berth on the apron. Come to that, there would be no apron. The spaceport had become a sizeable crater when something had destroyed the Franciscan ship Piety a while ago.

  Grimes had brought his charts with him. Together we studied them. He advised me to make my landing in the old Sports Stadium, on the shore of Darkling Tarn, not far from the city of Enderston, the ruins of which stood on the east bank of the Weary River. Those colonists had shown a morbid taste in place names . . . That applied to all the Rim Worlds, of course, but Kinsolving took the prize for deliberately miserable nomenclature.

  The commodore acted as pilot when we finally made our approach; he had been on Kinsolving before, more than once, and he possessed the local knowledge. I handled the controls myself, of course, but he was in the chair normally occupied by Bindle, advising.

  We were making an early morning descent—always a wise policy when landing on a world without proper spaceport facilities. The lower the sun’s altitude, the more pronounced the shadows cast by every irregularity of the ground. Too, when an expedition arrives at sunrise it has all the daylight hours to get itself organised. Left to myself, I’d have arrived when I arrived and not bothered about such niceties. It was Grimes, with his years of Survey experience behind him, who had urged me to adopt Survey Service S.O.P.

  So we were coming down after a few hours of standing off in orbit. Already there was enough light for us to be able to make out details of the landscape beneath us. There was the Weary River—and with all the twists and turns it was making it was small wonder that it was tired! There was the Darkling Tarn—looking, Grimes said, like an octopus run over by a steamroller. Bindle loosed off the sounding rockets that, at Grimes’ insistence, had been added to our normal equipment. Each of them, in its descent, left a long, unwavering smoke trail: there was no wind to incommode us.

  Each of them released a parachute flare that drifted down slowly. As we ourselves dropped, the picture in the periscope screen expanded. We could see the city at last, a huddle of overgrown ruins. We could see the Stadium, an oval of green that was just a little lighter in tone than the near-indigo of the older growth around it. One of the flares had fallen just to one side of the sports ground and started a minor brush fire; the smoke from it was rising almost directly upwards.

  At least it would be easier landing here than at the proper spaceport on Lorn . . . Grimes guessed my thoughts. “The ground’s level enough, Captain Rule,” he told me. “Or it was, last time I was here.”

  “Any large animals?” I asked.

  “Just the descendants of the stock brought by the original colonists. Wild pigs and cattle. Rabbits. They’ll all have sense enough to bolt for cover when they hear us coming down.”

  In the periscope screen the ground looked level enough. I maintained a slow but steady rate of descent, slowed it to the merest downward drift when there were only meters to go. At last the contact lights flashed on. I cut the inertial drive. The silence, broken at first by the sighing of the shock absorbers and the usual minor creakings and groanings, was oppressive. I looked at the commodore. He nodded, and said, “Yes, you can make it Finished With Engines.” Before I did so I glanced at the clinometer. The ship was a little off the vertical, but only half a degree. It was nothing to worry about.

  “So we’re here,” whispered Sonya. “Again.” I didn’t like the way she said it.

  “Shore leave?” asked Bindle brightly. “Of course, we shall want an advance from the Purser first, sir.”

  “Ha, ha,” I said. “Very funny.” I looked out through the view-ports. This didn’t look like a world on which there would be any need for money. It didn’t look like a world on which to take a pleasant walk.

  Oh, the day was bright enough, and such scenery as was in view was pretty enough, in a jungly sort of way, but . . . It was as though a shadow was over everything, dimming colours and bringing a chill to the air that bit through to the very bones. The sunlight streaming through the viewports was bright, dazzlingly so, to the outer eye—but as far as the inner eye was concerned it could have been the rays of a lopsided moon intermittently breaking through driving storm clouds. I’m not a seventh son of a seventh son or any of that rubbish, and if I applied for admission to the Rhine Institute for training they’d turn me down without bothering with the routine tests, but I do have my psychic moments.

  A premonition of impending doom, I thought. I liked the feel of it. I thought it again.

  “If you don’t mind, Captain Rule,” said Grimes, “I’ll assume command until such time as we lift off again. The ship is still your charge, of course, but all extravehicular activities are my pigeon.”

  “As you please, sir,” I said a little stiffly. He was doing no more than to confirm, in front of witnesses, what had already been decided—but it was essential that my officers have no doubt as to who was boss cocky of the expedition. “Your orders, sir?”

  “Please pass the word for everybody, ship’s officers and civilian personnel, to assemble in the ward-room for briefing. I shall just be repeating what I
have told you all time and time again during the voyage—but this is a world on which you can’t be too careful. This is a planet on which anything might happen, and probably will.”

  I reached for the microphone and gave the necessary orders.

  The wardroom was crowded with everybody packed into it, but there was seating for everybody. Grimes, nonetheless, remained standing. He said quietly, “Of all of us here, only Commander Mayhew, Mrs. Mayhew, Commander Verrill and myself have set foot on Kinsolving before . . .”

  Commander Verrill? I wondered, then realised that he meant Sonya. “As we have told you,” he went on, “this is a dangerous world, a very dangerous world. You have heard the story of what happened to the Neo-Calvanist expedition when an attempt was made to invoke the Jehovah of the Old Testament. I was among those present at the time, as was Mrs. Mayhew, and the crater where the spaceport used to be bears witness to the destruction of their ship, Piety. You have heard what happened when our own expedition, a little later, tried to repeat that foolhardy experiment. That time there was only one victim—me. And then there was the landing made by the Federation Survey Service’s ship, Star Pioneer, aboard which Commander Verrill and myself were passengers. That time the pair of us got into trouble . . .”

  “Of course,” Sonya said sweetly, “I wasn’t worrying myself sick about you the other times . . .”

  “Mphm. Anyhow, this a smaller expedition than the previous ones and I therefore insist that when excursions are made from the ship there is to be no splitting up; nobody is to go wandering off by himself on some wild goose—or wild ghost—chase. Personal transceivers will be carried at all times. Ship’s personnel, acting as escorts to the scientists, will be armed. Captain Rule and all of his officers hold commissions in the Sirian Sector Naval Reserve and are trained in the use of weaponry . . .”

  Ha! I thought. Ha bloody ha! I remembered, all too well, our practice session at the Navy’s small arms range shortly before our lift off from Dogtown. “Miss,” the exasperated Petty Officer Instructor had said at last to Betty Boops, “if you really want to hurt anybody with that pistol creep up close and hit him over the head with it . . .” And most of the rest of us including myself, weren’t much better. Only Sara, the Purser, made a fair showing.

  “Compared to the rest of you,” the P.O. had said, “she’s Annie Oakley.” He went on, turning to Betty, “And you, Miss, are Calamity Jane.” Sara had been quite pleased . . .

  Grimes continued, “You civilian ladies and gentlemen are not to set foot off the ship without your . . . watchdogs. Is that understood, Dr. Thorne?”

  “Understood, Commodore,” replied the scientist laconically.

  “Good. I don’t know about the rest of you, but my belly is firmly convinced that my throat’s been cut. I propose that we all enjoy breakfast before getting the show on the road.”

  There were, as a matter of fact, two shows to be gotten on the road. One was the small party leaving the ship on foot to poke around the stadium and its environs, the other one flew to the city in the pinnace that we had on loan from the Rim Worlds Navy and that we carried in lieu of one of our own boats, which had been left in Port Forlorn. Like any ship’s boat it was not only a spaceship in miniature but could be used as an atmosphere flier. Unlike a merchantship’s boat, it was armed, mounting a heavy machine gun, a small laser cannon and a rocket projector.

  Grimes and Sonya were in the boat party, as were Ken Mayhew, Dr. Thome, Rose, his wispy wife, Sara Taine and myself. Sara was pleased at having real guns to play with—somehow she had appointed herself Gunnery Officer of the pinnace—and was hoping that she would have a chance to use them. I was hoping that she wouldn’t.

  We boarded the boat in its bay. The commodore took the controls, the rest of us disposed ourselves around the small cabin. The inertial drive unit grumbled into life and we lifted from the chocks and then, with the application of full lateral thrust, shot out through the open port into the bright sunlight. Grimes took us round the ship in an ascending spiral. Bindle, who was minding the shop, waved to us from the control room. We were close enough to see his envious expression.

  Grimes leveled out, headed for the city. It was not easy to see from this relatively low altitude; when we had been looking down on it the street plan had been obvious enough, but from a height of a mere one hundred meters it looked only like an unusually lumpy piece of jungle in the distance. Oh, there were a few ruined towers, prominent enough, but they were so overgrown that they could have been no more than freak geological formations.

  I tried to enjoy the flight. I should have enjoyed it; the bright sunlight was streaming through the ports, the scenery over which we were skimming was unspoiled, I had enjoyed a good breakfast and my after-breakfast cigar was drawing well. And yet . . . For no reason at all—apart from a quite illogical feeling of unease—I kept looking aft. I noticed that the others—apart from Grimes—did so too. (But Grimes had his rearview screen above the console.) A fragment of half-remembered verse kept chasing itself though my mind. How did it go?

  Like one that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having cast a glance behind

  Durst no more turn his head,

  Because he knows a fearsome fiend

  Doth close behind him tread . . .

  Something like that, anyhow. And, in any case, there wasn’t any fearsome fiend in our wake. I hoped.

  Grimes tapped out his pipe and refilled and relit it for about the fifth time. Sara Taine checked, yet again, the pinnace’s fire control panel. (But could you shoot at ghosts? I wondered. Had anybody had the forethought to substitute silver bullets for the normal machine-gun ammo?) Dr. Thorne cleared his throat and, speaking loudly to be heard over the irritable snarl of the inertial drive, asked Mayhew, “Do you feel anything, Ken?”

  “I suspect,” replied the telepath, speaking slowly and carefully, “that something out there doesn’t like us . . .”

  “A normal state of affairs on this world,” grumbled Grimes.

  “Are there likely to be any manifestations, Commodore?” said Thorne.

  “Anything, no matter how unlikely, is likely here,” was the reply.

  Cheerful shower of bastards! I thought.

  Rose Thorne—people do tend to be given unfortunate names, although the lady’s parents couldn’t have been expected to know that she’d marry whom she did—had opened the case that she had carried aboard with her and was tinkering with fragile looking instruments. She was finding out, I supposed, if there were any variations in temperature, gravitational or magnetic fields or whatever. Presumably she discovered no anomalies. In any case, she said nothing. And Ken Mayhew had a very faraway look on his face, was staring into nothingness, a nothingness in which . . . something stirred. That was the impression I got. Cold shivers were chasing themselves up and down my spine.

  “Cheer up, George,” Sonya admonished me. “The first time here is the worst.”

  “Not for me it wasn’t,” grunted the commodore. “Although every time was bad.”

  “My first time was bad,” stated Sonya.

  We were over the outskirts of the city now, following a broad street through the cracked surface of which trees and bushes had thrust. On either side of us were the buildings, creeper-covered houses with empty windows peering like dead eyes through the tangled greenery. I found myself thinking of ancient graveyards—cemeteries in which the victims of massacre had been buried and commemorated, and then, after many years, forgotten. Something, disturbed by our noisy flight, scuttled below and ahead of us, finally diving into a doorway.

  “Hold your fire, Sara,” said Sonya sharply. “It’s only a hen.”

  “Nothing wrong with roast chicken,” I said. “The fowl in the tissue culture vats has long since lost whatever flavor it had . . .”

  “There wouldn’t have been much left for roasting if I’d let fly with the MG,” Sara told me.

  It was a feeble enough joke, but we a
ll laughed nervously.

  We came to a sort of square or plaza. There was a group of statuary—once a fountain?—in the middle of it, but so overgrown that it was impossible to see if the figures had been men or monsters. They looked like monsters now. Around the plaza were ruined towers, their outlines blurred by what looked like—was, in fact—Terran ivy. Those colonists had brought a fair selection of Earth flora and fauna with them, some of which had survived and flourished.

  Grimes set the pinnace down carefully, very carefully, selecting an area that did not have any sturdy bushes and saplings thrusting up through the paving. We landed with hardly a jar. Reluctantly, it seemed, he turned off the drive. We could hear ourselves think again. This was not the relief that it should have been. The silence, after the arhythmic snarl and thump of the motor, seemed about to be broken by . . . something. By what?

  “Well,” said the commodore unnecessarily, “we’re here.”

  “You know the city,” said Thorne. “Wasn’t there—isn’t there—some sort of temple . . .”

  “I don’t want to go there again,” said Sonya determinedly.

  Grimes shrugged. “It’s as good a place to start our . . . investigations as any. After all, we are here to investigate . . .” he remarked. He turned to Mayhew. “You’re the psionicist, Ken. What do you think?”

  The telepath seemed to jerk out of some private dream, and not a pleasant one. “The temple . . .” he murmured vaguely. “Yes . . . I remember. You told me about it . . .”

  “Where is this temple?” asked Thorne.

  “We shall have to walk,” Grimes told him. “It’s not on the plaza. It’s in a little alley . . . I’m not sure that I’ll be able to find it again . . .”

  “I can lead you there,” said Mayhew.

  “You would!” muttered Sonya. So the telepath was picking something up, I thought. He would home on it, as a navigator homes on a radio beacon. I was beginning to feel as the commodore’s wife was obviously feeling about it. Deciding to throw in my two bits’ worth I asked, “Shall we leave somebody to guard the pinnace?” Sara scowled at me. She was the obvious choice. She would be no more keen on going outside than any of us, but she most certainly did not want to be left alone.